Peter Clive

Peter lives on the southside of Glasgow with his wife and three children. He is a scientist working in renewable energy, and in addition to writing poetry, he enjoys writing and performing piano music.

Everything lies in ruins. This Glasgowis an ancient ruined city by the Euphratesafter some rival, or barbarian invasion,or simply the passage of time has had its way,gap sites where ziggurats once stood, shardsscattered across the brownfield yesteryearwhose damp tubercular breathcondenses on the back of my neck,

but this is the Clyde, not the Euphrates.This shattered and scattered clay whose pieces you pick up and holdis not some Mesopotamian jigsawof the sort archaeologists like to solve.These marks are not cuneiform pressed upon the cold hard fragments in your handthat you try to fit together and decipher.

It is you. It is your own living tongue after it has been turned to stone,and after the sledge hammer and wrecking ballhave had their way, and broken you,and dumped all your words in a middenand left you able to meet your mute selfonly behind glass, in a glass case, in a museum,reading how others have captioned you in labels:their interpretations, educated guesswork,accidental errors, deliberate falsehoods, lies,

in some nostalgia palacewhere the passage of time is frozento hold the living captive,saying, "this is how things wereso this is how they will always be.This is all in the past. It cannot save you.You are only what we say you are now."The word "no" lies untranslatedon a cuneiform tablet out of reach, hiddenbehind something lurid and embarrassing,

but there was a man who turned it backand raised your words from bones and ash,lifted them from this disintegrating clay,breathing life into them with poetry,restoring their voice and making them laugh,and bulldozing museums with basic facts.

Though all that's left of any life, once gone,is an unfinished jigsaw, its missing piecesnow forever lost, we'll fill the gapswith pieces of our own rescued from obscurityand the impertinence of casual oppression.

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John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK. He has published extensively in cultural studies, including twelve books. He is currently working on a thirteenth book, Refusing to be Realistic: Cultural Studies and Utopian Desire, to be published with Routledge.

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Until she recently retired Christine Lindey was an Associate Lecturer in art history at the University of the Arts, London and at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is a visual arts critic for the Morning Star and her fifth book, Art for All: British Socially Committed Art c.1939 - c.1962, will be published in the near future.

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Salena Godden has been described as ‘The doyenne of the spoken word scene’ (Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 3’s The Verb); ‘The Mae West madam of the salon’ (The Sunday Times) and as ‘everything the Daily Mail is terrified of’ (Kerrang! Magazine). She is also the lead singer and lyricist of SaltPeter, alongside composer Peter Coyte.

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Jean Turner studied at Kingston School of Art and worked for thirty-five years as a local authority housing and schools architect. She was General Secretary, then Honorary Secretary, of the SCR/SCRSS from 1985–2013 and is currently Honorary Treasurer.

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John Green is a journalist and broadcaster. He has authored and edited several books and anthologies on a wide range of subjects including political biographies, labour history, poetry, natural history and environmental affairs.

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Lynn Mally is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Irvine. She has published on Soviet cultural history, US/Soviet cultural exchange, and American culture in the 1930s. See www.americanagefashion.com

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Gareth Edwards is a socialist based in Portsmouth. He teaches on the Sports Journalism degree course at the University of the Arts in London. He blogs infrequently at https://inside-left.blogspot.co.uk

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David Betteridge is the author of a collection of poems celebrating Glasgow and its radical traditions, 'Granny Albyn's Complaint', published by Smokestack Books in 2008. He is also the editor of a compilation of poems, songs, prose memoirs, photographs and cartoons celebrating the 1971-2 UCS work-in on Clydeside. This book, called 'A Rose Loupt Oot', was published by Smokestack Books in 2011.

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Carolyn Pouncy, a historian specialising in Muscovite Russia, writes fiction under the pen name C. P. Lesley. Two of her novels—Desert Flower and Kingdom of the Shades—explore themes from the classical ballets Giselle and La Bayadère. See http://www.cplesley.com.

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Dennis Broe is a television, film and culture critic whose latest works are Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and The End of Leisure and the detective novel Left of Eden. He taught in the Master’s Programme in Film and Television Studies at the Sorbonne. His criticism appears in the Morning Star, on Arts Express on the Pacifica Network in the US, on Breaking Glass on Art District Radio in Paris, People’s World,​ and Crime Time. He is an Associate Editor of Culture Matters.

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Phil Brett is a primary school teacher, who has written two novels (Comrades Come Rally and Gone Underground) set in a revolutionary Britain of the near future. In between planning lessons and marking, he is writing the third.

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Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard.

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James Crossley is Professor of Bible, Society and Politics at St Mary's University, Twickenham. He writes mainly on religion and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first century and the historical Jesus in the first century.

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Will Stone is news editor for the Morning Star and freelances for various other national newspapers. He has written for online theatre review site What's On Stage, music magazines and has produced and presented several series on post-punk/industrial for ResonanceFM, an arts radio station in London.

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Catherine Graham's work has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK, USA and Ireland. Her first full collection, Things I Will Put In My Mother's Pocket, is published by Indigo Dreams Publishing (2013.

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Anne E. Duggan is a Professor of French and Chair of Classical & Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Wayne State University, Michigan. She is also Co-Editor of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies.

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Sarah Clancy is a poet from Galway, Ireland. Her last two collections of poetry are ‘Thanks for Nothing, Hippies' and ‘The Truth and Other Stories’ published by Salmon Poetry. In 2015 she was named the Bogman's Cannon People's Poet.

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Martin Brown is a retired teacher, a member of the National Education Union and Unify (a cross-union body campaigning for one union for all education professionals) and former editor of 'Education for Tomorrow'.

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Deborah Price lives in Deri. She has written four books for children and collaborated on and published another ten. They include poetry anthologies/collections and a 30th anniversary commemoration of the 1984 Miners' Strike.

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Kimberley Reynolds is the Professor of Children’s Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University in the UK. Recent publications include Children’s Literature in the Oxford University series of Very Short Introductions (2012) and Left Out: The Forgotten Tradition of Radical Publishing for Children in Britain, 1910-1949 (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Steve Pottinger is a performance poet who's passionate about the power of poetry to create connections between people. He believes in making an audience laugh and think and decide that poetry isn't so bad after all.

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Marc James Léger is an independent scholar living in Montreal. He is editor of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today (2014) and author of Brave New Avant Garde (2012), The Neoliberal Undead (2013) and Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory and Politics (2015).

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Paul Donovan is a freelance journalist, who reports on football for the Morning Star. He has also contributed across the British media on a variety of issues across the political and cultural sphere over a number of years.

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Peggy Deamer is a professor of architecture at Yale University and a practicing architect. She is the founding member of the Architecture Lobby, an activist organisation that argues for the value of architectural work within and without the profession.

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Tayo Aluko is the writer and performer of the multi-award-winning CALL MR ROBESON which he has been touring worldwide since 2008. His new play JUST AN ORDINARY LAWYER has also started being performed internationally since February 2017.

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Dr Geoff Bright is a Research Fellow in the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. With a background as a rail union activist and community educator in the UK coalfields, his research focuses on the intersection of class, place, gender and affect as it impacts on the political imagination of working class communities.

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Andy Croft has written and edited over 80 books, including poetry, biography, teenage non-fiction and novels for children. He writes a regular poetry column for the Morning Star, curates the T-junction international poetry festival on Teesside and runs Smokestack Books. He lives in North Yorkshire.

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Rebecca Hillman is a writer, theatre maker and activist. Her teaching and research at the University of Exeter, where she works as a Drama lecturer, are informed by her involvement in trade union and community campaigns. Her research explores the role of art in social and industrial movements past and present, and the way in which the history of political art and creative protest has been documented. Please contact Rebecca if you are interested in helping build a cultural wing of the labour movement at r.a.hillman@exeter.ac.uk

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Susan Jones is a published writer, researcher and consultant on contemporary visual arts matters, at www.padwickjonesarts.co.uk. She is a specialist in artists’ livelihoods, professional development and employment patterns, and was Director of a-n The Artists Information Company 1999-2014.

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Matt Bruce is an architect who moved to Lewis in 1987 and worked in both public and private sectors and then on housing development in the islands' council. He is now retired but active in a number of community organisations.

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Steve Willey is a poet, researcher and critic. He is lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. Elegy, his most recent book of poetry, was published by Veer in 2013.

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Paul Dovey is a trade unionist who sometimes gets angry and writes things. He strongly believes that the act of creativity itself is empowering and that working class culture should make its own space and use its own voice.

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Amir Darwish is a poet, born in Syria and now living on Teeside. His poetry has been published in the USA, Pakistan, Finland, Morocco and Mexico, and he is a graduate of Teesside University and the University of Durham.

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Fred Voss, a machinist for 32 years, has had three collections of poetry published by the UK’s Bloodaxe Books. His latest booklet is The Earth and the Stars in the Palm of Our Hand, published by Culture Matters.

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Julia Mickenberg is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States and co-editor (with Philip Nel) of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature.

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Peter Raynard is a writer and editor of Proletarian Poetry: poems of working class lives. He has been widely published and his debut collection Precarious will be published by Smokestack Books in April 2018. His poetic coupling of the Communist Manifesto will be published by Culture Matters in May, 2018.

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Matt Abbott is a spoken word poet from West Yorkshire. Having started a few weeks before his 18th birthday, his career has so far ranged from a major record deal with the band Skint & Demoralised, through to political activism, education work and forming spoken word record label Nymphs & Thugs. He is an ambassador for Trinity Homeless Projects and CRIBS International, as well as Poet-in-Residence at the National Coal Mining Museum for England.

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Prudence Chamberlain is a Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing. Her first collection is forthcoming with Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, while her collaborative work with SJ Fowler, on Disney, will be released later this year. She is currently writing a book on affect and the fourth wave of feminism for Palgrave Macmillan.

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Boff Whalley is a songwriter, fellrunner and former postman, previously in the troublesome pop group Chumbawamba. He has worked extensively in theatre and arts projects, collaborating on choral pieces at Manchester Museum, Tate Britain and Somerset House, London.

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Alan Dunnett is a poet, active union member and former theatre director who now works at Central Saint Martins, London. His poems have appeared in magazines and ezines including Dead Ink, The Recusant, Militant Thistles and Communist Review.

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Anthony Squiers is a political philosopher and poet. He is the author of An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht: Revolution and Aesthetics and co-editor of Philosophizing Brecht: Critical Readings on Art, Consciousness, Social Theory and Performance.

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Glenn Bradford is a poet and short story writer based in Sutton-in-Ashfield. He works for Royal Mail, and takes inspiration from the people and places he sees whilst out delivering the post. In some ways he genuinely is a man of letters.

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A student of English and history, Kathryn Keane's poetry has appeared in in 'Silver Apples Magazine', the 'NY Literary Magazine', 'Bitterzoet Magazine', and the 'Stanzas: An Evening of Words' chapbook.

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Mina Boromand and Chris Bird create art and cartoons for 'The Morning Star' newspaper and trade union pubIications, hoping to connect political action to creativity and imagination. They have organised exhibitions and displays at the Marx Memorial Library and other events such as the annual Red Star conference.

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Alexis Lykiard was born in Athens. His books include 9 novels, translations from French, 2 memoirs of Jean Rhys, and numerous poetry collections – most recently Schooled For Life (Shoestring 2016). His website is www. alexislykiard.com

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Nicholas Tucker was formerly Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. Before that he was first a teacher and then an educational psychologist. He is the author of nine books about children, childhood and reading, and has also written six books for children.

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Martin Gollan paints but also works with print and video. He recently has been working with local charities and their beneficiaries to dynamically illustrate the impacts of austerity and welfare reform.

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Philip Bounds is a historian, journalist and critic. He is the author of a number of books, including Orwell and Marxism (2009), British Communism and the Politics of Literature (2012) and Notes from the End of History (2014).

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Peter lives on the southside of Glasgow with his wife and three children. He is a scientist working in renewable energy, and in addition to writing poetry, he enjoys writing and performing piano music.

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William Hershaw is a poet, playwright and folk musician. He is the founder and leader of the Bowhill Players, a group who perform the poems and songs of Cardenden miner writer Joe Corrie (1894 - 1968).

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Mair De-Gare Pitt worked in Community Education for many years and is now semi-retired, running Creative Writing classes. She attends a poetry group at The Capel in Bargoed and is one of the Red Poets.

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Danny Mitchell is an independent filmmaker from London. He works part-time as a mental health social worker and spends the rest of my time making political, social issue and human interest documentaries.

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Robert Myles is an expert on the social history of early Christianity and the New Testament. He is the author of The Homeless Jesus and the Gospel of Matthew (2014) and editor of Class Struggle in the New Testament (2019).

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K. Satchidanandan has 24 collections of poetry, 5 books of travel, a full length play, a collection of one-act plays, and many collections of critical essays including 5 books originally written in English on Indian literature.

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David Erdos is an actor, writer, director with over 300 professional credits. He is a published poet, playwright, essayist and illustrator. He has lectured on all disciplines in theatre and film for leading performing arts colleges, schools and universities around the world.

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Charlie Clutterbuck Ph.D. was an Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Food Policy at City University, London. He’s now Trustee of Incredible Farm, Todmorden, and of The Larder, Preston.

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Clara is co-President of the PCS Union Culture Group, Branch Secretary at National Museums Liverpool, and has led on the campaign against privatisation at National Gallery. She is a disability and climate activist and member of the Labour Party.